Microsoft 365 Lists – a powerful App, SharePoint lists not needed any more

Microsoft Build 2020 came up with lot of exciting announcements but the most interesting one was Lists as individual app in Microsoft 365.

Lists has been around for many years as part of SharePoint platform , I remember explaining my end users Lists is something like an excel rows or table in database in SharePoint 2010 days and to be frank not a lot has been changed, we have not seen huge improvements except some more templates being introduced. We got conditional formatting recently in SharePoint online, of course you can do more these days due to introduction of Power Platform (Power Apps and Automate).

This is reason I term this annoucement as interesting one as it takes the Lists to another level and put it on same level as other standalone apps.

So let’s look what all we get in Microsoft 365 Lists

• It can be accessed as a standalone app from waffle of Micorosft 365
• Various default predefined templates such as issue tracker, asset tracking, blank , contacts, inventory, events, onboarding etc are available
• Lists has its own home page
• Available as mobile app
• Can be added to Microsoft Teams as an App or tab
• Can have conversation around Lists in Microsoft Teams or can have conversation around each item in a Microsoft Lists
• Lists will have views calendar, grid, custom, cards etc
• Conditional formatting is available in Lists
• Rules: You can set rules to show hide columns based on differen rules, it’s like light weight customizing forms, for definition read below statement
  • Building rules is as easy as writing a sentence. Once you decide on the outcome, click-fill if/then steps to design your rules. Choose people, status, and value changes to send notifications or programmatically update values elsewhere in the list. Finally, use rules to set reminders to keep everyone informed.
• Lists can be shared with users so you can manage permissions and you can be owner of lists
• You can boomark Lists using the favorites feature
• Can create a new list from existing excel data
• Able to preview a list before it is created
• You can chose an icon and a color for you lists to make distinctions between different lists
• Lists can be saved as draft till you are ready to share with others
• You can comment on individual list items and also mention someone
• You can design your own card views
• Data availability and accessibility via Graph API

As you can read it has lots of features and covers a lot of scenarios which were not possible before in SharePoint lists so let’s have a look into them

• Rule based email sending capabilities, earlier we used to write workflow or event receivers or Flows
• Grid or card views , earlier we used to customize using JSLink, Jquery, JS etc
• Earlier a whole site has to be created even though only a list was needed
• In past following requests had come to be from business users which are avaialble by default now
  • Save as draft before it is ready to be released
  • Different icons to visualize it better
  • Simple form customziations can be done by Rules earlier we had to inject JS in edit, new or view forms

We can clearly infer that Microsoft 365 Lists are smart, powerful and easily replace SharePoint lists so we don’t need them anymore. With ability to add this in Teams we can see it is more flexible and very well integrated in Microsoft 365.

We can also infer that a need of Teams sites in SharePoint is even less now and if you are using Microsoft Teams along with Lists probably you don’t need SharePoint team sites.

As as ending note I am really forward to this new app which will be extremely useful and I would like to move most of SharePoint list to new Microsoft 365 Lists.

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References

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/announcing-microsoft-lists-your-smart-information-tracking-app/ba-p/1372233 https://resources.techcommunity.microsoft.com/microsoft-lists/